First published in 1945, Animal Farm is a novella by the famous British writer George Orwell and is widely regarded as the most outstanding political fable of the twentieth century. The latest edition of Arvin was published by Sag Press in 2020 and is available on the thatsbooks platform.
Animal Farm is a masterpiece of dystopian literature, and at the beginning of its publication, it attracted a large number of readers with its simple and easy-to-understand language, fluent writing and profound truth, which caused great repercussions.
Animal Farm
By George Orwell
This political allegorical novel describes the brewing, rising, and eventual metamorphosis of an "animalist" revolution:
Before his death, a pig in Manna's manor, the "Old Major", called a general assembly of all the animals in the manor, and he proposed that animals have been oppressed by humans since their birth, and when they lose their use value, they will be ruthlessly slaughtered, and there is no freedom at all. The root cause of all evil is the atrocities of man, and only by overthrowing man by revolution can all animals live a life of freedom. This speech caused a great response among the animals, and the animals gradually awakened their self-awareness.
After the death of the old major, the wiser pigs in the manor summarized his speech into a complete set of ideas, calling it "animalism". Led by pigs, the animals drove away the farmer and became the owners of the estate. They renamed Manna Manor "Animal Farm" and practiced "all animals are equal" and established the "Seven Precepts" of a legal nature that all animals must observe.
Soon after, however, an internal political struggle ensued among the pigs of the leading group, and a pig named "Snowball" was expelled as a traitor to the revolution, while another pig named "Napoleon" gained the leadership of the manor.
As their power grew, the pig clique gradually became the new privileged class in the manor, becoming more authoritarian and totalitarian rulers than their human owners, and the animals, if they were slightly dissatisfied, led to a bloody purge. The name of the animal farm was abandoned, the ideal of the farm was changed to "but some animals are more equal than others", and the animals returned to their former miserable state.
The novel alludes to the totalitarian politics of the Stalin period in the Soviet Union, and the content is extremely relevant to the author's personal experience. In the 1930s, the author George Orwell participated in the Republican Army led by the Communist Party of Spain as an international volunteer army in support of the Spanish Civil War against Franco, but witnessed the power struggle within the left.
At that time, Orwell's Marxist United Workers' Party was recognized by the Comintern as a Trotskyist organization, and Stalin ordered its elimination, sending the political police, experts in the search for heresies, and military instructors to Spain to establish a reign of terror in the Republican Army. Orwell and his wife were implicated. This storm gave Orwell a clear picture of the nature of Stalin's totalitarianism and made him more firm in his own understanding of democratic socialism. Animal Farm and 1984 were born in this context.
The author dissects the political totalitarianism of the time, denounces all forms of totalitarianism, expresses the pursuit of democracy and justice, and points out that a post-revolutionary regime, without democratic supervision and the rule of law, must be alienated and must go in the opposite direction, just as this group of animals jumped out of the old cage and fell into a new trap, still enslaved and treated unequally as before. At the same time, the novel's depiction of animal greed, selfishness, cowardice and vanity also vividly alludes to the dark side of human nature.
Since its publication, "Animal Farm" has had a major impact on European and even world literature, has been translated into more than twenty languages and widely circulated, and has also been made into various forms such as movies and dramas, and many sentences have become classic sentences, such as:
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others",
"The two are equal, but one is more equal than the other",
"Four legs are good and two legs are bad",
"The beings outside see people from pigs, and from men they see pigs, and they see men from pigs; but they can no longer distinguish who is a pig and who is a man",
"War is war, and the dead are the only good people",
"Things have never been, and will never be, much better than in the past or greatly worse than in the past – hunger, toil and disappointment are the constant laws of life anyway",
"In an age of deception, telling the truth is an act of revolution",
"If you feel it's worth it to keep human, even if it can't have any results, you've already beaten them",
"Life is more complicated than freedom".
About the Author
George Orwell (1903-1950) was a famous British novelist, journalist and social critic. Born in the British colony of India at the time, he was educated at the prestigious Eton College. After graduation, he has worked as a policeman, a dishwasher, a teacher, a bookstore clerk, a dock worker, etc., and deeply felt the difficulty of the people at the bottom of society. He fought in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and worked on the BBC in anti-fascist propaganda during World War II. Representative works include "Animal Farm" and "1984", of which "1984" is known as one of the most influential English novels of the 20th century.
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